Truth About Weight Loss and Low Calorie Diets

Weight loss works on a simple math: the more calories you burn, the more pounds you lose; or, the fewer calories you consume, the faster you achieve fat loss. The common man thinks that if he doesn’t consume any calorie at all, he would lose weight overnight. However, if weight loss were really so simple then there won’t be such a high number of obese adults and children in America.

The math of weight loss looks quite simple on the surface, but it is equally complicated once you scratch this surface and dig deeper. You would be surprised to learn that weight loss is far more complicated that you thought it to be.

Have you ever wondered why so many fad diets failed to help you with weight loss? Most of them place such abnormal restrictions on your food consumption that your body does exactly the opposite of what you want it to do.

The body, as a rule of thumb, has one and only aim: to survive by hook or crook. It would do anything to live. Therefore, when it notices that you are eating only lemon juice or cabbage in an entire 24-hour period, as opposed to dozens of junk foods you used to eat not too long ago, it would think that something is amiss.

It would feel that you are trying to kill it. Naturally, it would conserve energy in the form of fat instead of burning it, so that it could use this fat to survive this (and any future) ‘famine’. Instead of keeping your metabolic rate high and burning fat, it would slow down your metabolic rate and put a brake on the fat burning process. This is the reason why you won’t get anywhere with those fad diets.

For example, let’s say that normally you consume as much as 2,500 calories per day. All of a sudden, you take on a restrictive diet plan and reduce your calorie intake to just 2,000 calories per day. This means that you have reduced your daily calorie intake by 500 calories. If you continue at this rate you should be losing 3,500 calories or one pound of fat per week (FYI, 3,500 calories make one pound of fat). BUT, you have probably heard the saying that “good things don’t last long.”

After three or four weeks, your body would get accustomed to your new calorie consumption level and adjust your metabolic rate accordingly. As such, you would no longer burn fat as before. In other words, you would reach what is commonly known as the ‘weight loss plateau’. People who reach the weight loss plateau aren’t able to lose weight any further. There your weight loss goes haywire.

Disappointed with your results, you would quit dieting and get back to normal eating mode. This means that instead of consuming 2,000 calories, you would consume 2,500 calories as you used to do before dieting. However, since your body has adjusted your metabolic rate to burn only 2,000 calories daily, it would deposit the surplus 500 calories as fat.

This is how you start gaining back all those pounds you lost with the help of your diet, and what more, if you continue eating ‘normally’ at this rate, you would definitely add several extra pounds to your belly over and above what you started with.

Now you know why fast weight loss diets don’t work, and why you hardly get any permanent results with the so called ‘low-calorie’ or ‘low-fat’ diets. The key to successful weight loss is to forget about dieting and start eating natural and organic foods. Being low on calorie, organic foods would automatically reduce your daily calorie intake level, WITHOUT making your body starve.

Keep in mind that you should not try to lose weight too fast by using drastic measures such as starving or crash-dieting. Remember that natural and healthy weight loss is always slow, but unlike the fast weight loss diets, the results you get from following natural weight loss methods are permanent.

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